Enforcing Restrictive Covenants

In Norbrook Laboratories (GB) Limited ("Norbrook") v (1) Adair (2) Pfizer Limited 2008 EWHC 978 the High Court held that Norbrook was entitled to protect its confidential information and customer connections by enforcing post termination non-solicitation and non-dealing restrictive covenants against a departing sales manager but not a non-competition covenant.

Ms Adair was a sales manager for Norbrook. Her employment contract contained restrictive covenants which included a non-competition restriction and a non-solicitation/non-dealing restriction. Both restrictions were to last a year following the termination of Ms Adair's employment. The non-competition covenant was a restriction on working in a business whose products competed with those of Norbrook. This concerned the last five years of Ms Adair's employment. The non-solicitation/non-dealing restriction applied to customers and prospective customers within the last two years of Ms Adair's employment. In December 2007, Ms Adair left Norbrook to work as sales manager for Pfizer Limited, the multinational pharmaceutical company.

With regard to the non-competition restriction, the High Court held that the scope of the businesses from which Ms Adair would be precluded from working was wider in scope than was reasonably necessary to protect Norbrook's legitimate business interests and therefore that this restriction was unenforceable. With regard to the non-solicitation/non-dealing restriction, the High Court found that a restriction of one year was reasonable and was prepared to uphold the restriction, except in relation to prospective customers.